Allowing "amateur" commentators to have a go

[ahydra]

Sorry for the long post...

 

A while back there was a trial of some audio vugraph commentating using Mumble, which (I thought) worked pretty well. One thing that happened during this trial was that since this was a new venture there weren't many commentators immediately on hand. As a result the main organiser of the audio commentary invited people to have a go themselves and if I wasn't so shy I would have taken them up on the offer :)

 

I've been thinking whether a similar "have a go" idea could be put into place for regular text vugraph commentary. With the epic number of vugraphs Roland organises these days, sometimes (albeit rarely) there aren't commentators for all tables in play at any one time; this is aggravated by the fact the vugraphs take place in a wide variety of time zones.

 

Also sometimes you want to watch a player, but because he's Italian/Polish/etc the vugraph organisers have decided to have commentary in Italian/Polish/etc instead of English. Perhaps a feature can be (fairly easily, I would have thought) added to BBO so that you can see the commentary language offered and filter commentators - then an English commentator team and an Italian team can commentate the same table and people can pick which to listen to. (This can of course be extended to all languages, so even the Chinese could end up with native commentary of Hamman bidding yet another 3NT!)

 

More importantly it gives players who have got the "basics" (by which I mean not "A=4, K=3, Q=2, J=1" but more the "there's an endplay/squeeze possible" level) solidly down, and would love to share their knowledge with others and learn directly from other commentating experts, the chance to do so. This includes myself which is primarily why I'm making this post, but no doubt I am one of many.

 

I'm not sure how exactly this could be put into practice - perhaps if the feature I mentioned above was implemented first, some tables at minor events (or "minor" tables at events with shortage of regular commentators) could be designated as "amateur commentary tables" and people invited 1, 2 or 3 at a time to have a go for say 4-6 hands - then regular viewers can filter out the amateur commentary if they so wish. The expert commentators take note of the amateurs who did particularly well, and after their name comes up a few times maybe they join the "elite"?

 

I feel this would be a good idea to not only augment the pool of commentators/commentary languages but also to teach people and allow them to teach too. As such I'd love to hear other people's views on this. :)

 

ahydra

[Rain]

I'm going to comment on the voice commentary part.

 

I think it's much easier to test this out with voice and not require code change. In fact, I've heard there's some event by I think, Poland that's thinking of doing voice commentary again. (Not sure ask bbo poland org, they like trying new ideas). Try asking them if they'll like to run casual voice commentary if you like. If it's popular, it's more likely it'll be ported into BBO. Afterall, setting up multiple channels for voice commentary by anyone who wants to talk should be easy.

[pirate22]

The Writer has a point-interwined with voice commentry?which im not aware off----------But welcome all suggestions, Roland W has a big JOB,and needs to control the present situation-for the pleasure of at,--- the moment Kibbers.

and the BBO site--FG has let Roland so far do a great JOB,and RW is a mine of "INFO".

But i agree to allow "the non experts"on a Trial period to inject their "NON Professional insight" to the game-----with no "UMBRAGE". Decision made by the EXPERTS-as to whether one obtains their TICKET,to contribute.

i am sure-we as non experts can contribute-To as they say "Our Wonderfull Game"------------A valid point Roland regards